


Every Day is Exactly the Same

by doctor_bitchface_phd



Category: HLVRAI - Fandom, Half-Life
Genre: Body Horror, Graphic Description of Injury, Heavy Angst, Inhuman/Alien Benrey, Major Character Undeath, Mentions of Major Character Death
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-08-13
Updated: 2020-08-13
Packaged: 2021-03-06 06:54:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,711
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25869244
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/doctor_bitchface_phd/pseuds/doctor_bitchface_phd
Summary: Benrey lived, Gordon forgot.Inspired by Alieryn-art's HL2VRAI AU on Tumblr.
Kudos: 17





	1. Crown of Shit

**Author's Note:**

> this chapter contains:  
> -violent descriptions of injury  
> -an emotional breakdown  
> -imagery of insects  
> -cannibalizing one's own dead body  
> please read at your own risk!

Your vision goes white and you can’t scream, your body ripping itself and melting into itself all at once; you feel something tear in your chest, like shards of glass scattering inside you and driving into every organ, burying their wicked barbs into your flesh, leaving tiny pieces behind to smart and sting in their wake. Your arm is wrenched apart, muscle tearing along the grain as every tendon pulls against all the others, shattering your bones in the process. It transcends pain into a blinding agony that occupies all corners of your mind, like liquid steel has been poured through your veins, up your spinal column and into your brain. Skin scalds and tears away, and your eyes ache as they roll into the back of your skull, and you can’t think over it, can’t do anything but feel your body tear itself apart. 

You feel tears dripping from your burning eyes, and you can’t help but feel so fucking helpless, begging, praying, screaming out for release, for salvation from this oppressive darkness, this raw, mind-shredding fear, and it’s the same fucking thing, the same old charade, and you’re back there, you’re too small to understand why nobody cares about you, you’re too small to fight the terror, the overwhelming dread, that sure knowledge that someone was right there, right behind you, ready to hurt you. You can’t do anything but cry, and you can’t fight the razor-sharp memories of how your friends looked, how Freeman looked, when they hurt you, how cheerful, how fucking careless they seemed. They knew they were hurting you, and they were glad for it, they drank in your pain like the fucking demons all people were.

Your “friends”. How the fuck were you so stupid? You walked right into their fucking trap, let them shoot you, strangle you, insult you and you never suspected that maybe, just maybe, they were out to hurt you like everyone else was. You thought you were having fun, thought your jokes landed, you thought that they liked you, but clearly, as always, you were fucking wrong. You let Freeman shoot you, stab you, punch you off of cliffs, and you never fucking once suspencted that he would kill you for real, that he would steal your armor, your resilience in that world, and tear you apart, sending you spiraling into the void.

Freeman. You should have killed him when you could’ve, but you of all people know that hindsight is worthless; all you can do is predict the future and fight the present. You fell for him, fell for his fucking trap, let him freely walk right up to you and shoot you in the face and you never once suspected that he might actually hate you, that he would hurt you just like everyone else. You thought that maybe you had found someone different, you lost yourself in his eyes and let yourself think of how you could be better for him, how you could be with him and be better. You thought fucking wrong.

Eventually, your eyes run dry, and you sniffle tearlessly for a few more minutes, eventually managing to calm yourself down. Between the residual pain of being violently thrust into the void and the mental exhaustion from your recent emotional breakdown, you want little more than to sleep for the rest of your, likely short, life; your eyelids feel like they have lead weights on them, and your entire face feels cracked and dry, yet wet at the same time, almost like a sponge soaked through with water and wrung out again.

You feel your arm detach, and see shards of bone and chunks of oily black meat spiraling off into the void, just behind your severed arm; you stare dully at the charred, shredded limb, watching with half-lidded eyes as thick globules of tar-like blood drip lazily from the open flesh; the liquid bubbles from cuts all over the arm, staining the blue of the detached, tattered shirt sleeve black. You watch as the skin sinks from the normal pale bluish-gray to a dark, ominous gray, like that of an approaching thunderstorm on the horizon, and as you drift, you can’t help but notice that you’ve slowed significantly; sniffing the air yields gasses around you, which is surprising; you thought you had been shoved into vacuum.

Your vision goes hazy, and then dark, and the dull, throbbing ache in your chest and skull cools to nothing at all; you find it strange that such suffering could disappear so suddenly. You feel so fucking cold, like your blood has been replaced with ice water; you try to move your remaining arm, try to maybe wrap it around yourself to preserve what little body heat you have left, but you find that you can’t seem to move anymore. You try to flex something, anything, and squirm around, the sensation of cold wetness and total darkness around you confusing only for a moment.

Your core, that black mass of flesh and ganglia in your chest, has separated from your cooling body, severing ties with your rapidly freezing, gigantic humanoid suit of flesh; for a moment you dream of being back in your body, of having hard, dark chitin instead of soft, greasy flesh, of normal pincers and mouthparts instead of that wet, soft hole in your head. You scratch at the wet coldness around you, hard beak cutting into oily muscle, tearing a few strands of flesh off. Chewing on the soft, greasy meat, you know what you need to do; getting back onto earth will take some effort, and the only source of calories for miles around is your old body. Cannibalizing enough energy from it to connect to a host will be difficult, but from there, you can survive, thrive, even, you can take nutrients both from your corpse and from the host body and its surroundings, and you can grow, break out of the host to become independent, and finally, finally regain your old form.

Your larval body wriggles at the thought, pulsing with joy. Your spirits rejuvenated, you tear at the flesh surrounding you with abandon, barely able to contain your anticipation. The thought of having all six limbs back, of razor-sharp, bone-hard, three-fingered talons instead of weak little mammalian paws, of razor-sharp mouthparts embedded in Freeman’s skull, it gives you hope in the pitch darkness.


	2. Wiggle

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> You find a host!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this chapter contains  
> -graphic descriptions of eating semi-human flesh  
> -imagery of insects  
> -possible dereality, i'm not sure on that front  
> -extremely graphic body horror  
> read at your own risk!

You scratch at the hard, rocky surface of the bone, tearing out chunks of ossified tissue to suck at the sweet marrow within; it tastes better than anything you ever ate in your damned disguise, that soft, pale thing that bled strange and crimson. Your sharp, spined tongue rasps at the cold, gooey substance within; it almost tastes like meat soup, but sweeter.

You lose track of time as you feed; hours, days, and eventually weeks pass as you salvage the most important organs. From cold, slimy fat that falls apart in your pincers, forcing you to lick it up, to rapidly cooling internal organs, their soft, fatty tissues tasting almost like some wonderful meat dish that you can’t remember the name of, you wriggle through the ice-cold flesh, chewing tunnels and pathways as you go. Your mouthparts suck an almost jelly-like substance from the massive eyes; each one is almost as big as you curled into a ball.

Your undefined, ambiguous black mass of a body, with a sharp, bony beak as the only defining feature, soon grows into an almost maggot-like form; a fat, soft abdomen, with translucent off-white skin and dark, tarry insides, ran through with veins and arteries, some of the vessels containing a softly glowing blue liquid, illuminating the pitch darkness to some extent. Your body is segmented by darkish gray bands, sectioning off the aforementioned abdomen, a thorax with tiny, vestigial limbs that wiggled and scratched around reflexively, and a large, roughly triangular head crowned by six enormous eyes, as well as the normal situation of mouthparts; two outer mandibles, with sharp, hooked teeth for snaring and butchering prey, a smaller set of similarly split jaws behind the first, with sharp, rough surfaces for grinding plant matter, as well as tearing apart kills, and finally, a set of true, inner jaws, with rows of sharp, shark-like teeth; you take a moment to clack your outer mandibles together, reveling in making all the sharp, scraping noises that your human disguise couldn’t.

Inevitably, the bones and internal organs will run dry, but for now, that’s not an imminent problem. You feed for what feels like weeks, tearing and scratching out the nutrients necessary for the transfer.

Finally, after lord knows how long, you are ready.

Your abdomen glows bright, artificial raspberry flavoring blue, and you reach, you extend an immaterial part of you into the void, out through the icy gasses floating in undefined clouds, then, not quite past the space, but above it, beyond it, into somewhere new, somewhere different. You can feel a sharp, almost bony payload form in your astral limb, reaching out to your physical form, connecting a new neural cord to your brain and opening a new orifice somewhere within your stomach-analogue. 

The limb can’t sense much, but it can feel life, detect warmth and biochemical processes. Eventually, after searching and finding nothing but small, unusable animals, you finally find a group of suitable hosts; There are five human-sized lumps, made of flesh and bone and nutrients. You inspect them closer, and find that not all of them are viable, however; One of them is wearing some sort of armor, some full body covering that prevents you from probing any closer to inspect its body. Two more were augmented, their bodies made unsuitable by metal and unrecognizable chemicals, electronics and disconcerting genetic material. One was anomalous in a way you just can’t place, an aura of power and danger around them; that left one suitable host. Satisfied with your inspections of the human, you flex your immaterial limb into it, forcing the physiological payload into the host’s center of mass.

After what felt like hours, your brain flooded with new information, new thoughts and feelings and sensations. Taking a moment to clutch your strange, too round head, you opened unfamiliar eyes to the world around you.


End file.
